On 'The Soul of Man Under Socialism' by Oscar Wilde
"With the abolition of private property, then, we shall have true, beautiful, healthy Individualism. Nobody will waste his life in accumulating things, and the symbols of things. One will live. To live is the rarest thing in the world. Most people exist, that is all."
In his seminal political essay, Oscar Wilde posits that, through the abolition of private property, only then can man be truly emancipated and enabled to pursue tracks of individualism through a public ownership of the means of production, holistically. It is under a collectivized society, whereby the people constitute the manner by which civilization is organized, that the individual can flourish and prioritize his own respective personal needs and prerogatives; socialism advocates the advancement of artistic development and cultural contributions over the monopolies and sequences of exploitation that entail the accumulation and expansion of wealth under capitalism. In such a society, cooperation replaces competition, material well-being is ensured for all, and individuals can pursue their unique potential without restriction.
He emphasizes thus that art is an essential manifestation of individualism, in an abstract sense, portraying it as a "disturbing and disintegrating force" that poses an opposition to stringent conformity and conventionalist monotony. He observes that few individuals--Byron, Shelley, and Flaubert--have historically been fully capable of realizing their artistic talents particularly because they had private wealth and were materially free from the shackles of wage labor as members of the bourgeoisie, whether in a figurative or literal sense of the term. In Wilde's view, socialism would therefore transmit this freedom into a consecution of democratization that would usher in the ability for an abundance of others to live creative, authentic lives, regardless of their posterior socioeconomic class under the free market.
Moreover, he then goes on to distinctly demarcate that his iteration of socialism is a libertarian rendition, explicitly condemning authoritarian practices, as "all authority is quite degrading. It degrades those who exercise it, and degrades those over whom it is exercised." He predicates his governmental framework on one centered around minimal state interference in social affairs, so as to maximize liberty exempt from scrutiny and suppression; he emphasizes individual freedom and self-expression rather than political prescriptions for achieving socialism. This essay, quite intricately, focuses predominantly on the prospective lives of artists and theoretical individuals under his hypothetical modality of implementing socialism rather than outlining a specific political strategy and plan, unlike most other revolutionary thinkers of his time.
My contentions with this ideological frame of reasoning, as a communist, as I must expound, stem from his position on authoritarian policies being inherently inhibitive and his rejection of charity, paired counterintuitively with his acceptance of a form of economic authoritarianism. He criticizes "unhealthy and exaggerated altruism," perhaps referring to the egalitarian principles of Marxist doctrines, arguing that the aforementioned perpetuates the existence of poverty by keeping the poor alive or amusing them as such, arguing that these acts are part of the disease rather than a cure; he envisions a society in which penuriousness and economic beleaguerment fundamentally do not exist through a radical reconstruction of society in itself. Yet, simultaneously, to achieve this, Wilde calls for the abolition of private property and the replacement of competition with cooperation; this is not a purely voluntary, market-based libertarian solution--rather, it is a radical repositioning of economic life that would require collective decision-making, redistribution, and possibly state intervention to enforce the new social order. In effect, Wilde’s vision is authoritarian in its economic structure--it demands a top-down transformation of society to remove the disease of poverty, even though he personally rejects the moral weight of charity.
Nonetheless, I find his essay to be a rather diaphanous elucidation of the liberating nature of socialism--in disregard of the intrinsic contradictions of Wilde's libertarian-socialist fusion, that is. It is a collectively governed society that truly emancipates the individual, one where everyone is innately proposed as an ontologically equal subject and ergo one where all manifestations of oppression are omitted, superseded with cohesion and unity.
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